:( Think im going to have to use Regular Expressions :(

[eluser]TornUp[/eluser]
[quote author="jedd" date="1256253729"]Said munging would be using an algorithm such as you described - removing hyphens, underscores, spaces. I'd only do this so that my users, if they were encouraged to do the same mental munging when searching for part numbers, would be more likely to get a result, and get one faster. It's dubious how much time this would save, though I reckon it would be low-cost to implement it.[/quote]

do you mean you recommend having 1 column with the original part number(EG: "ABC-123") and one column with "purifyed" data (EG: "ABC123") and then run a query on both?(or run query1(purifyed)-> did it return any results? no! -> run query2)

hmmm oviously, after reviewing my problem... im going to also have to also compensate for my end user(who trust me... are stupid! lol) by also runing the same "purification" on their search string..

@Jedd - if im getting the wrong end of your solution, sorry... could you explain a little more detail with an example? :red: